L83 Congress \ 

i Session J 



HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 



f Document 
\ No. 1268 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS 



SENATOR HENRY CABOT LODGE 



PRINTED IN THE "OUTLOOK" 




January 14, 1913.— Ordered to be printed 



WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1913 



.<?7iLS3 



In the House of Representatives, 

January 1£, 1913. 
Resolved, That an article in the Outlook, by Henry Cabot Lodge, 
on One Hundred Years of Peace, be printed as a House document. 
Attest: 

South Trimble, 

Clerk. 



D, OF D, 
\W 23 1913 






ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE. 



The last war between Great Britain and the United States began in 
June, 1812. There has been no war between the two countries since 
the treaty of Ghent was signed on Christinas eve in 1814. Strictly 
speaking, the absence of war constitutes peace, and therefore we may 
describe these hundred years just passed as a century of peace be- 
tween the United States and Great Britain. But in the larger and 
better sense of the word it must be confessed that the relations between 
the two countries during that period have been at times anything 
but peaceful and often far from friendly. Indeed, there have been 
some perilous moments when war has seemed very imminent. To 
describe this period, therefore, as one of unbroken good will merely 
because there was no actual fighting would be wholly misleading. If 
a review, however brief, of the relations between Great Britain and 
the United States since 1812 is to possess any value, it can only be 
through showing how, by slow steps, with many interruptions and 
much bitterness on both sides, we have nevertheless finally attained 
to the genuine friendship in which all sensible men of both countries 
rejoice to-day. This fortunate condition has been reached only after 
many years of storm and stress, which it seems to posterity, always 
blessed with that unerring wisdom which comes after the event 
might have been easily avoided. 

To understand the present situation aright, to comprehend the 
meaning and effects of the War of 1812 and of the 98 years of peace 
which have followed its conclusion, it is necessary to begin with the 
separation of the two countries by the peace of 1782, when the con- 
nection between England and the United States ceased to be that of 
mother country and colonies and became the more distant relation 
which exists between two independent nations. Just now there ap- 
pears to be a tendency among Englishmen to regard that separation 
of the eighteenth century as a small matter, especially so far as their 
own country is concerned, a view which, however comfortable, is 
hardly sustained by history ; and we may well pause a moment at the 
outset to consider just what the war resulting in the treaties of Paris 
meant, for on that decisive event rests ultimately all that has since 
come to pass. 

3 



4 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE. 

As an illustration of the attitude of mind to which I have referred, 
let me take the recent case of a well-known writer and very popular 
novelist. Some years ago Mr. H. G. Wells came to this country, and 
on his return to England, like many of his countrymen, he wrote a 
book about the United States. Unlike many of his countrymen, 
however, he wrote a very pleasant and friendly book, enlivened by 
some characteristic remarks in favor of socialism and of converting 
the Niagara Falls into horsepower. He made, however, one comment 
which struck me at the time, and which, I think, has been made since 
by others of his countrymen. This comment was in connection with 
his visit to Boston, as I remember, and criticized us good naturedly 
for the extreme care with which we marked all spots connected with 
the Revolution, and for the apparent importance which we attached 
to that event. Mr. Wells, unlike Sir George Trevelyan, the most 
brilliant of living English historians, seemed to think that this 
American feeling about the Revolution which resulted in the inde- 
pendence of the United States was provincial, if not parochial. In 
view of the sound system of British education, which has a great deal 
to say about English victories great and small and is curiously reti- 
cent as to English defeats, it is perhaps not surprising that the 
importance attached to the incidents of the American Revolution in 
this country should surprise the average traveler from Great Britain. 
But, putting aside the partiality which Americans feel toward the 
Revolution, owing to the fact that they were victorious, and the lack 
of interest with which the British regard it, because they were de- 
feated, it is perhaps not amiss to point out that the war for American 
independence really was an event of high importance, and was so 
considered then, as it has been ever since, by dispassionate persons. 

The revolt of the American Colonies in 1776 agitated the world of 
that day far beyond the parish limits of the United States. That 
revolution divided parties and overthrew ministries in England. It 
involved France and Spain in war with Great Britain and created 
the armed neutrality of the northern powers, events which are rarely 
caused by trifling or provincial struggles. But the American Revo- 
lution was something much more even than this. It broke the British 
Empire for the first and, so far, for the only time. It took from 
England her greatest and most valuable possession. With the 
American Colonies she lost a population equal to about a fifth of the 
inhabitants of Great Britain at that period, as well as the ownership 
of the best part of a great continent. The independence of the 
Colonies was the foundation of the United States, and, whether one 
approves of the United States or not, there can be no question, I 
think, that they constitute to-day a large and important fact in the 
existing world. It was an Englishman, I believe, who said that, 
after all, England's most considerable achievement was the United 



ONE HUNDRED YEAES OF PEACE. 5 

States. Finally, and this is something which I feel it would hardly 
be possible to describe as parochial, modern democracy began with 
the American Revolution. When Emerson, with the insight of the 
poet, declared that the shot which the embattled farmers fired at 
Concord Bridge was heard " round the world," he told the exact 
truth. At that bridge in that little New England village the first 
drumbeat of democracy broke upon the troubled air, and there the 
march began. That same drumbeat was heard a little later in 
France, when several things happened which Mr. Wells would not 
probably regard as provincial, and which caused some stir at the 
time. Looking over the world to-day, it may be fairly said that no 
greater event could be commemorated than the first uprising of de- 
mocracy which swept over the governments of the nineteenth century 
and which is still pressing onward, crossing even now into the con- 
fines of Asia. 

Yet, very characteristically, this American Revolution, which Mr. 
Wells smiles at gently as a little provincial incident, but which seems 
not to have been without its effect on the history of civilized man, 
turned on a question of law. That two great branches of the same 
people, speaking the same language, holding the same beliefs, and 
cherishing the same institutions, should go to war about a question 
of legal right in the imposition of taxes is indeed very typical of the 
race and breed. It is also one reason why the War of the Revolution, 
as a whole, was sullied by few acts of cruelty or ferocity, for, as 
Macaulay pointed out long ago, the character of a civil war is very 
largely determined by the amount of oppression which one side has 
suffered at the hands of the other. The government of the English 
colonies in America had been, on the whole, easy and liberal. Sir 
Robert Walpole, with his wise indifference which allowed the dust to 
gather upon American dispatches, and the elder Pitt, who had the 
faculty of arousing the enthusiasm of the colonists by appealing to 
their patriotic impulses and by treating them as friends and equals, 
had made the bonds between the mother country and her children 
very strong. But a very dull and narrow-minded King, served by 
ministers of slight capacity or of judiciously pliant natures, soon 
undid the work of the two great ministers and forced on the war 
which had in it at that moment nothing of the inevitable. The 
Revolution thus generated was fought out through seven long years, 
and the Colonies won. There was, of course, bitterness of feeling on 
both sides, but none which could not have been quickly and easily 
overcome if right methods had been pursued. The Americans, it is 
true, did not carry out the treaty properly in regard to the Loyalists, 
and the British, on their side, failed to observe it in regard to the 
relinquishment of the western posts, which were an absolute threat 
not only to the expansion but to the very existence of the United 



6 ONE HUNDKED YEAES OP PEACE. 

States. One of the greatest achievements of Washington's adminis- 
tration was the Jay treaty, and to make this settlement with England 
he sacrificed the French alliance, but he removed forever the western 
menace and cleared the frontier of the United States from a danger 
which in time of war might have proved fatal. The French Revolu- 
tion, which destroyed the American alliance, divided public opinion 
in the United States, as it did in England, and the immediate result 
was virtual, although not declared, war with France, a situation that 
gave England an opportunity to bind her former colonies closely to 
her, which unfortunately did not seem to English statesmen a thing- 
worth doing. Then came the great struggle with Napoleon, and 
again England might easily have made her former colonies her close 
friends and allies. This policy, indeed, was so obvious that it is hard 
to understand why even English ministers failed to adopt it. Jeffer- 
son, with all his eulogy of France and denunciation of England for 
political purposes, was more than ready to unite with England 
against Napoleon if she would only have allowed him to do so, but 
after the death of the younger Pitt and the dissolution of the min- 
istry of " all the talents," the English Government fell once more into 
the hands of some very inferior men. Ministers of the caliber of 
Perceval, Castlereagh, and Lord Liverpool, united with extreme 
Tories like Lord Eldon, whose ability was crippled by their blind 
prejudices, were utterly unable to see the value of friendship with the 
United States, and preferred to treat their former colonists with a 
comfortable contempt. The one very clever man not in opposition 
in those days was Canning, and he did more than any one else, per- 
haps, by his unfortunate attitude, to drive the United States away 
from England. It was he who said that the Navy of the United 
States consisted of " a few fir frigates with a bit of bunting at the 
top." For the sake of this not very numerous alliteration he paid 
rather heavily in the loss of a good many English frigates at a 
later day. 

It is not pleasant to Americans to recall the years which preceded 
our second war with England. There was no indignity, no humilia- 
tion, no outrage, that England on the one side and Napoleon on the 
other did not inflict upon the United States. Our Government sub- 
mitted and yielded and made sacrifices which it is now difficult to 
contemplate with calmness, until at last a party arose composed of 
young men who were profoundly convinced that anything was better 
than such conditions, and that if we were to have a national existence 
worthy of the name we must fight. They did not care very much 
with whom we fought, but they were determined to fight some one in 
order to vindicate the right of the United States to live as a Nation 
without dishonor. The unscrupulous dexterity of Napoleon and the 
marvelous stupidity of England resulted in our fighting England 
instead of France, and thus we came to the War of 1812. 



OjSTE hundked yeaes of peace. 7 

We had no Army and a very small Navy. The political group 
which had forced war upon us, although right in their reasons for 
going to war, were utterly wrong in the ignorant boasts with which 
they proclaimed our readiness for battle. Wholly unprepared, we 
suffered many defeats on the Canadian frontier, which were redeemed 
only by the two battles of Lundys Lane and Chippewa. On the seas 
and lakes we had almost unbroken victory, and, finalty, at New 
Orleans, after peace had really been made but before it was known, 
Jackson defeated the veterans of Wellington's Peninsular campaigns 
with a thoroughness and a severity which were so marked that the 
battle is hardly alluded to in British histories, and must therefore 
be relegated to the provincial class of historical events. So the war 
came to an end before it had lasted three years, and when the treaty 
of Ghent was signed that instrument did not contain the settlement 
of a single one of the questions which had made the war unavoidable 
and for which the United States had fought. Yet, none the less, 
the war had settled all those questions. Never again did England 
attempt to stop an American man-of-war or an American merchant- 
man and take seamen whom she claimed as deserters from their decks. 
Never again did she attempt to interfere with American commerce. 
Whatever losses the United States might have suffered in the war, 
however much her pride might have been wounded by the destruction 
of the Capitol at Washington, the real victory was with the Ameri- 
cans. They had fought, and they had gained what they fought for. 
They sacrificed nothing — not an inch of territory — by so doing. The 
only losses suffered by the United States were in men and money, and 
by those losses we had put an end forever to the humiliating treat- 
ment which had been meted out to us during the first decade of the 
century. As the years passed by all this became apparent, and it is 
now perfectly plain that the War of 1812 achieved the result for 
which it was fought, by establishing the position of the United States 
as an independent Nation and restoring the national self-respect. 
Although the treaty of Ghent did not show it, we have but to look 
behind the curtain which the hand of time has drawn aside in order 
to learn that the men of that day in England recognized what had 
happened, although they might not admit it to themselves, much less 
to the public. They confessed the truth in many ways, none the less 
clearly because the confession was indirect. 

Take, for example, this letter from Mr. James, the naval historian, 
to Mr. Canning: 

mb. w. james to mb. canning. 

Peeby Vale, Neae Sydenham, Kent, 

January 9, 1827. 
The menacing tone of the American President's message is now the prevailing 
topic of conversation, more especially among the mercantile men in whose com- 
pany I daily travel to and from town. One says : " We had better cede a point 



S ONE HUNDRED YEAES OF PEACE. 

or two rattier than go to war with the United States." " Yes," says another, 
" for we shall get nothing but hard knocks there." " True," adds a third, " and 
what is worse than all, our seamen are half afraid to meet the Americans at 
sea." Unfortunately, this depression of feeling, this cowed spirit, prevails very 
generally over the community, even among persons well informed on other sub- 
jects, and who, were a British seaman to be named with a Frenchman or 
Spaniard, would scoff at the comparison. 1 

The words of Mr. James show the effect upon the public mind in 
England of the American naval victories, which so profoundly inter- 
ested Napoleon. They penetrated so deepty that they actually reached 
the intelligence of the Liverpools and the Castlereaghs. Even they 
felt the meaning to England's prestige as a naval power of losing 11 
out of 13 single-ship actions and two flotilla engagements on the Great 
Lakes. Their alarm can be measured by the honors they conferred on 
Capt. Broke, who commanded the Shannon when she defeated the 
Chesapeake — higher honors than Nelson received for his brilliant 
service in the battle of Cape St. Vincent. Nor was this all. Despite 
their contempt for the Americans and their loud assertions of satis- 
faction with their successes, as the war drew to its close the ministers 
became so frightened that they proposed to send Wellington to 
America to command their armies on the very scene of the victories 
which they so loudly proclaimed. The duke's letters in regard to this 
proposal are most instructive and reveal the real results of the war, 
for Wellington was never the victim of illusions. He had the great 
faculty of looking facts in the face. 

On the 9th of November, 1814, he wrote from Paris to Lord Liver- 
pool as follows: 

I have already told you and Lord Bathurst that I feel no objection to going 
to America, though I don't promise to myself much success there. I believe 
there are troops enough there for the defense of Canada forever, and even for 
the accomplishment of any reasonable offensive plan that could be formed from 
the Canadian frontier. I am quite sure that all the American armies of which 
I have ever read would not beat out of a field of battle the troops that went 
from Bordeaux last summer if common precautions and care were taken of 
them. 

That which appears to me to be wanting in America is not a general or 
general officers and troops, but a naval superiority on the Lakes. Till that 
superiority is acquired it is impossible, according to my notion, to maintain an 
army in such a situation as to keep the enemy out of the whole frontier, much 
less to make any conquest from the enemy, which, with those superior means, 
might with reasonable hopes of success be undertaken. I may be wrong in this 
opinion, but I think the whole history of the war proves its truth, and I suspect 
that you will find that Prevost will justify his misfortunes, which, by the by, 
I am quite certain are not what the Americans represented them to be, by 
stating that the navy were defeated, and even if he had taken Fort Mason he 
must have retired. The question is whether we can acquire this naval supe- 
riority on the Lakes. If we can't, I shall do you but little good in America, 
and I shall go there only to prove the truth of Prevost's defense and to sign a 

1 " Canning's Correspondence," edited by E. J. Stapleton, Vol. II, p. 340. 



ONE HUNDEED YEAES OF PEACE. 9 

peace which might as well be signed now. There will always, however, remain 
this advantage, that the confidence which I have acquired will reconcile both 
the army and people in England to terms of which they would not now approve. 

In regard to your present negotiations, I confess that I think you have no 
right from the state of the war to demand any concession of territory from 
America. Considering everything, it is my opinion that the war has been a 
most successful one, and highly honorable to the British arms ; but from par- 
ticular circumstances, such as the want of the naval superiority on the Lakes, 
you have not been able to carry it into the enemy's territory, notwithstanding 
your military success, and now undoubted military superiority, and have not 
even cleared your own territory of the enemy on the point of attack. You can 
not then, on any principle of equality in negotiation, claim a cession of territory 
excepting in exchange for other advantages which you have in your power. 

I put out of the question the possession taken by Sir John Sherbrooke be- 
tween the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Bay. It is evidently only temporary, 
and till a larger force will drive away the few companies he has left there; 
and an officer migbt as well claim the sovereignty of the ground on which his 
piquets stand, or over which his patrols pass. 

Then if this reasoning be true, why stipulate for the uti possidetis? You can 
get no territory ; indeed the state of your military operations, however credit- 
able, does not entitle you to demand any ; and you only afford the Americans a 
popular and creditable ground which, I believe, their Government are looking 
for, not to break off the negotiations, but to avoid to make peace. If you had 
territory, as I hope you soon will have New Orleans, I should prefer to insist 
upon the cession of that province as a separate article than upon the uti possi- 
detis as a principle of negotiation. 

And again, on November 18, 1814, he wrote to the Earl of Liver- 
pool : 

I have already told you that I have no .objection to going to America, and I 
will go whenever I may be ordered. But does it not occur to your lordship 
that, by appointing me to go to America at this moment, you give ground for 
belief all over Europe that your affairs there are in a much worse situation 
than they realty are? And will not my nomination at .this moment be a triumph 
to the Americans and their friends here and elsewhere? It will give satisfac- 
tion, and that only momentary, in England; and it may have the effect of rais- 
ing hope and expectations there which, we know, can not be realized. 

Despite the " military successes," Wellington did not think that 
England could make any demand for territory or compensation, 
which shows that the " successes " had been as barren as they were 
trivial. The invincible troops from Bordeaux were badly beaten by 
Jackson, and Pakenham, one of Wellington's favorite generals, was 
killed, so that he did not capture New Orleans, as the duke expected. 

The result was a treaty of peace that on its face only brought peace, 
which the duke evidently thought was all England could expect. 
There need not have been any war between England and the United 
•States in 1812 if England had only seen fit to make the United 
States a friend instead of a foe. But England did not so will, and 
the war taught her that the United States could no longer be bullied 
and outraged with impunity. Thus the War of 1812 'brought, after 
all, a peace worth having, and laid the foundations for that larger 



10 ONE HUNDKED YEAES OF PEACE. 

peace which has lasted for a hundred years. During that time, 
through many vicissitudes, the relations of the two countries have so 
improved that we are now warranted in believing, what all reflecting 
men earnestly hope, that another war between England and the 
United States has become an impossibility. 

These larger results of the war, so plainly to be seen now, were 
not of course immediately apparent. The old attitude was still too 
fixed and the old habits still too strong to be abandoned in a moment. 
We made a brief treaty of commerce and navigation with England 
in June, 1815, six months after the conclusion of the treaty of Ghent, 
but this treaty disposed of none of the outstanding questions as to 
which the treaty of Ghent had been silent, and some of these thus 
passed over were of a nature which imperatively required settlement. 
A British officer, unconscious apparently that a war had been fought, 
undertook to search some of our vessels upon the Great Lakes, a little 
eccentricity which was not repeated. Despite the agreement of the 
Ghent Treaty, England held on to Astoria and the posts in the ex- 
treme northwest, and, what was still worse, she also attempted to 
take the ground that our fishing rights, determined by the treaty of 
1783, had been extinguished by the war. Acting' on this opinion, 
British cruisers seized American fishing vessels, and the condition 
of affairs on the coasts of Nova Scotia, Canada, and Newfoundland 
became serious in the extreme. Mr. Adams, then minister of the 
United States in London, brought these questions to the attention of 
Lord Castlereagh, urging upon him the necessity of further treaties 
to settle these disputes, to extend the commercial convention of 1815, 
and to make some agreement in regard to the slaves who had been 
carried off after the conclusion of the war, as well as with reference 
to the disputed northwestern boundary. His discussions with Lord 
Castlereagh, which are detailed at length in his diary, were fruitless, 
and the British Cabinet declined at that time to enter upon further 
negotiations. It may be inferred that they did not think it worth 
while to take any steps toward improving their relations with the 
American people. Soon after these conferences with Lord Castle- 
reagh Mr. Adams returned to the United States in order to take his 
place in President Monroe's Cabinet on the 1th of March, 1817, and 
Mr. Rush succeeded him as minister at London. Once more an 
effort to come to a further agreement on some, at least, of the out- 
standing questions was made, and Mr. Rush was instructed that, if 
England would assent, Mr. Gallatin, who was our minister at Paris, 
would be joined with him in the negotiations. Then it was that the 
effects of the war began to be really apparent. The exasperation 
caused by the seizure of our fishing vessels and by the refusal to 
carry out the provisions of the treaty of Ghent on the northwest 
coast made it evident that if something was not done the two coun- 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE. 11 

tries would again be involved in hostilities. This danger, which 
would have made no impression upon the minds of the British minis- 
ters 10 years earlier, was now effective, and England's action showed 
that she was no longer ready to go to extremes. The ministry 
changed its attitude and assented to a new negotiation. The result 
was the treaty of 1818, by which England admitted in principle the 
American contention that the fishing rights conceded in 1783 were 
final in their nature and could not be abrogated by war. Mr. Rush 
and Mr. Gallatin, moreover, succeeded in obtaining larger conces- 
sions in this respect than their instructions called for, and the Ameri- 
can fishing rights within the 3-mile limit, and also the right to dry 
and cure on the coast, were recognized as to certain portions of New- 
foundland, Nova Scotia, and Canada. The treaty also disposed of the 
boundary from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, and 
from there westward to the ocean the country was left open to the 
occupation of the subjects and citizens of both powers for a term 
of 10 years. The commercial convention was extended, and provi- 
sion was made for the settlement of American' claims on account of 
the slaves who had been carried away by referring the whole matter 
to the decision of some friendly sovereign. Nothing was said about 
the subject of seamen's rights, which had been so largely the cause of 
the war. The treaty of 1818 was as silent on this topic as the treaty 
of Ghent, but this question had in reality been settled by the war 
itself, for England, having found that the theme was one upon which 
the United States was ready to fight, quietly allowed her claims in 
this direction to die away. 

Four years after the treaty of 1818, and in accordance with the 
fifth article, the question of compensation for slaves or other prop- 
erty carried Siwaj after the war was referred to the Emperor of 
Russia as arbitrator, and the Emperor's award decided that the 
United States was entitled to just indemnification for all such private 
property taken hj the British forces, and more especially for all 
such slaves as were carried awaj^ from the places and territories for 
the restitution of Avhic'h the treaty stipulated. The adoption of the 
treaty of 1818 was also the signal for the restoration to the United 
States of Astoria and the other points on the coast of the extreme 
northwest. In this way the treaty of 1818, and the award of the 
Emperor of Russia which grew out of it, brought the relations of 
the two countries into a better condition than they had enjoyed since 
the close of the American Revolution; and these treaties may be 
said to have constituted the first step toward the improvement of 
those relations which were destined to grow better, although with 
many checks and hindrances, for 100 years to come. 

The two countries were also drawn nearer together by holding the 
same attitude in regard to the revolting colonies of Spain in South 



12 ONE HUNDBED YEAES OF PEACE. 

America, and by their common dislike and distrust of the principles 
of the Holy Alliance. When Canning broke away from the some- 
what musty Toryism which thought everything was to go on just as 
of old, and as if the French Revolution had never happened, he not 
only powerfully aided the South American republics, but he greatly 
strengthened the position of the United States. Canning did not at 
all approve of the extended form which his policy took on in the 
Monroe doctrine, but his work could not be undone, and a common 
sympathy and a common policy in the South American struggle for 
freedom drew Great Britain and the United States closely together 
in the eyes of the world, and also, although to a less degree, in their 
own estimation. 

After the award of the Emperor in regard to indemnity for the 
slaves carried off by the British forces in the War of 1812, there was. 
with the exception of the conventions of 1827, renewing and extend- 
ing the treaty of 1818 and providing for an arbitration of the dis- 
puted northeastern boundary, no international transaction involving 
serious differences, and no treaty between the two Governments of 
Great Britain and the United States for 20 years. The marked effect 
which the War of 1812, as I have pointed out, had produced upon the 
attitude of England toward the United States was, however, very 
largely confined to the intercourse of the two Governments. That 
intercourse had become what in diplomatic parlance is termed " cor- 
rect"; and the old tone, so familiar in British dispatches before the 
War of 1812, when the ministry treated the United States as if it 
were a collection of African tribes and therefore not entitled to the 
ordinary good manners of international relations, wholly disap- 
peared. Officially we had forced our way into the family of nations 
and had secured the customary courtesies which international inter- 
course demands. Yet this improvement, which was of the first im- 
portance, did not go very far toward altering the feeling which 
existed among the peoples of the two countries toward each other. 
Our intercourse with Great Britain after the treaty of 1818 entered 
upon another phase quite outside the scope of governmental action, 
which in its result did more lasting harm to the cause of genuine 
friendship between the two countries than all the best efforts of 
diplomatists or public men on either side could remedy or undo. 
Prior to the War of 1812 many books and much writing in reviews 
and newspapers appeared in England which treated of the United 
States in the most unfavorable manner and in a spirit which at times 
might fairly be called malignant. This systematic defamation was 
carried on so generally and so persistently that it gave rise to a fixed 
belief in the United States not only that it was part of a deliberate 
plan, but that some of the writers, like Moore, Ashe, and Parkinson, 
were actually in the pay of the British Government and that they 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS' OF PEACE. 13 

wrote for the purpose of inflaming- English hostility toward every- 
thing American and of preventing emigration to England's former 
colonies. During those early years of the century the people of the 
United States seem to have had the good sense to treat these criti- 
cisms with indifference; and when the controversy between the 
countries culminated in war, in the presence of real fighting attacks 
made in print fell unnoticed from the press. After the Avar, however, 
and after the settlement of the commercial relations of the two coun- 
tries by the treaty of 1818, the habit of depreciating and libeling the 
United States, either in books or in more ephemeral publications, en- 
tered upon a new phase. Anyone who will take the trouble to examine 
what was written in England about the United States during the 
period from 1820 to 1850 will find it difficult to avoid the belief that 
the assaults upon the American people were systematic in their 
nature. 

Those who are curious in such matters can find an admirable sum- 
mary in Mr. McMaster's history, in which the English comments 
upon the United States from 1820 to 1810 are vividly described. 
It seems almost incredible that such things could have been said and 
written by one ostensibly friendly people about another people who 
spoke the same language and inherited the same political traditions. 
There were, without doubt, many things in the United States of that 
day which were open to just criticism. No successful defense, for 
example, could be entered before the tribunal of the civilized world 
in behalf of negro slavery. But the English critics did not confine 
themselves to that which was deserving of criticism. Everything in 
the United States was to them anathema. The great reviews gave 
many pages to depicting what the United States was as they beheld 
and interpreted it. Robert Southey in the Quarterly and Sydney 
Smith in the Edinburgh were only two of the most distinguished 
among the many writers, great and small, who devoted themselves 
not merely criticizing, but to slandering the United States. The}^ 
were not ashamed to effect their purpose by telling the most absolute- 
falsehoods, and the lengths to which they went seem now well-nigh 
incredible. The men of America were said to be " turbulent citizens, 
abandoned Christians, inconstant husbands, unnatural fathers, and 
treacherous friends." The men who had whipped English vessels in 
11 single-ship fights out of 13 were accused of having run away 
shamefully when they could not fight to advantage. As they gen- 
erally fought to advantage at sea, they had not often run away. u ' In 
the southern parts of the Union," says another calm thinker and 
judicious critic, " the rights of our holy faith are almost never prac- 
ticed; one-third of the people have no church at all. The religious 
principle is gaining ground in the northern parts of the Union. It 
is becoming fashionable among the better orders of society to go to 



14 ONE HUNDRED YEAES OF PEACE. 

church." It is interesting to consider this picture of churchgoing 
becoming fashionable among the descendants of the Puritans, but 
the writers had forgotten, probably, that New England was settled 
when it was a wilderness by people who went there, as Carlyle puts 
it, because they wanted to hear a sermon preached in their own way. 
" The supreme felicity of a true-born American is inaction of body 
and inanity of mind " is another description of the people of the 
United States, and the reproach of inactivity is one of the most comic 
ever addressed to Americans, even at that time. Then, of course, the 
British critics had a great deal to say about our total lack of lit- 
erature and the entire absence among us of any men of distinction. 

Franklin, we were informed, had elicited some useful discoveries, 
but that was because he had lived in England for some time. It 
might be suggested that there were many other persons dwelling in 
England whose residence in that favored island had failed to make 
them capable of eliciting Franklin's useful discoveries. It was also 
predicted that he would not be remembered for 50 years. Prophecies 
of fame are always perilous, and it is to be feared that Franklin is a 
good deal better remembered to-day than Sydney Smith or Southey — 
the most considerable of our critics in those days — and more read, too. 
if we may judge from the fact that every civilized nation not long- 
since sent eminent representatives to Philadelphia to celebrate the 
two hundredth anniversary of his birth, a ceremony which seems to 
have been omitted in the case of Southey and Sydney Smith when a 
century had elapsed after their coming into the world. Kobert 
Fulton, it was asserted, stole his invention from seeing the sailing 
ships which ran on the Clyde with steam power in 1787, although no 
mention is made elsewhere of the persons who performed that feat, 
which does not seem to have traveled beyond the Clyde, and which 
is just as veracious as the statement, also made at that time, that 
Fulton was born in Paisley, in Scotland, when in reality he had the 
misfortune to be born in Pennsylvania. 

These instances give a very faint impression of English criticism 
upon America at that time, although such stuff is hardly to be dig- 
nified by the name of criticism. It was in reality childish and rather 
ignorant abuse. But now, contrary to what had happened in the 
earlier years, the Americans, unfortunately, were roused into taking 
it up and making elaborate replies. They had not much difficulty in 
controverting the false statements and misrepresentations so freely 
made, but they did not stop there. They naturally availed them- 
selves of the tu quoque argument, and it was not at all difficult in the 
history of England to find facts which, with appropriate twists and 
bendings, made the English people appear in a very unenviable light. 

This warfare of books and magazine articles continued and was 
much emphasized and embittered when it was taken up on a large 



ONE HUNDBED YEAES OF PEACE. 15 

scale by popular writers like Mrs. Trollope and Capt. Hall; but 
everything else sank into insignificance compared to the effect of one 
book, much more temperate than any of the others, but written by 
a great genius who saw fit later to sharpen what he had said in a 
book of travels by carrying his animosity into the realms of fiction. 
Charles Dickens came to the United States in 1841. He was received 
with an outburst of affectionate and admiring enthusiasm which has 
rarely been seen anywhere in the case of a man of letters. He went . 
home and wrote a book about us called "American Notes," and then 
he immortalized certain types of American character in " Martin 
Chuzzlewit," He said a great deal that was very true and entirely 
deserved. The characters of the novel were unfortunately in many 
respects only too real, and deeply angered as we were at the time, 
it may be safely said that Elijah Pogram and Jefferson Brick and 
Hannibal Chollop, General Choke, and Mrs. Hominy have an im- 
mortality more assured among the American people than anywhere 
else, for the anger has long since died away, while the truth of the 
satire and the comicality of these beings created by the magic touch 
of genius still remain. But at the time the resentment was intense. 
Whether what was said was just or unjust, true or untrue, there was 
a widespread feeling in the United States that, whoever else might 
find fault with and ridicule us, Charles Dickens, after the reception 
which had been given him, was debarred by every rule of loyalty and 
good manners from doing so. That this feeling was natural, and that 
the rule was one which could be both accepted and observed, was made 
visible to all men not long after the visit of Dickens. 

A few years later another great English novelist came to the United 
States; came twice, in fact, and delivered lectures. No doubt, with 
his keen and penetrating observation, he perceived many things 
which lent themselves to criticism, to ridicule, and to satire, of which 
no living writer was more capable than he. He was by temperament 
very sensitive to just those shortcomings which are common and re- 
pellent in a crude and unformed society. He was urged in every 
way and tempted with the promise of great profits to write a book 
p.bout America, but he declined. He had been cordially received in 
the United States; he had lived in our houses; he had accepted our 
hospitality; only kindness had been shown him. Others might write 
what they pleased about America, but he would not. Let me recall 
what he himself said in a " Roundabout " paper : 

Yonder drawing was made in a country where there was such hospitality, 
friendship, kindness, shown to the humble designer that his eyes do not care 
to look for faults or his pen to note them. * * * How hospitable they were, 
those Southern men! In the North itself the welcome was not kinder, as I, 
who had eaten Northern and Southern salt, can testify ! 



16 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OE PEACE. 

How kind and generous it all is. and how pleasant it is now, to 
everyone who loves the memory of the genius that created Becky 
Sharp and drew the character of Colonel Newcome to know that he 
was, above all things, loyal and true. We had on our own side, too, a 
distinguished man of letters whose conception of his duty toward the 
two nations who read his books was to cherish friendship and kindli- 
ness and not to seek for faults and embitter feelings. Let me describe 
him in Thackeray's words, for they both thought alike in this great 
matter which involves nothing less than good will among men : 

Two men, famous, admired, beloved, have just left us, the Goldsmith aud 
Gibbon of our time. * * * One was the first ambassador whom the 
New World of Letters sent to the Old. He was born almost with the Re- 
public; the pater patriae had laid his hand on the child's head. He bore Wash- 
ington's name ; he came amongst us bringing the kindest sympathy, the most 
artless, smiling good will. His new country (which some people here might 
be disposed to regard rather superciliously) could send us, as he showed in his 
own person, a gentleman who, though himself born in no very high sphere, was 
most finished, polished, easy, witty, quiet, and socially the equal of the most 
refined Europeans. If Irving's welcome in England was a kind one, was it 
not also gratefully remembered? If he ate our salt, did he not pay us with 
a thankful heart? Who can calculate the amount of friendliness and good feel- 
ing for our country which this writer's generous and untiring regard for us 
disseminated in his own? His books are read by millions of his countrymen, 
whom he has taught to love England, and why to love her. It would have been 
easy to speak otherwise than he did ; to inflame national rancors, which, at the 
time when he first became known as a public writer, war had just renewed ; to 
cry down the old civilization at the expense of the new, to point out our faults, 
arrogance, shortcomings, and give the republic to infer how much she was the 
parent state's superior. There are writers enough in the United States, honest 
and otherwise, to preach that kind of doctrine. But the good Irving, the peace- 
ful, the friendly, had no place for bitterness in his heart and no scheme but 
kindness. 

Unfortunately the example of Irving and Thackeray had but few 
imitators. Everything which these two said and wrote or omitted to 
say and write was forgotten in the clash of men who took a precisely 
opposite course, to the great detriment of all concerned; and the 
bitterness was concentrated around the American Notes and their 
author, whom the American people had loved and honored and taken 
to their hearts. It was this feeling that the man whom they had 
admired and cheered and feasted had proved disloyal which made 
Dickens's criticism and ridicule rankle more than that of all others. 
But if we leave the personal equation aside, Dickens was only the 
culmination of the general commentary which England then made, 
and apparently thought it well to make, upon the United States. 
Both people spoke and read the same language. In those days they 
were still closely akin. We read English books, copied English fash- 
ions, and looked up to English standards in society and in literature, 
and therefore all that was said in England of the kind which has 
just been indicated went home and made Americans very angry and 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OE PEACE. 17 

very sore. We were a new people, or rather we were the offspring 
of an old people settled in a new country, and we were young, very 
self-conscious, very sensitive, and we felt attacks which would be no 
more noticed to-day than the rattle of a dead autumn leaf fluttering 
before the wind. We replied to the criticisms in a savage and intem- 
perate manner. Sometimes we wounded ; generally we produced no 
effect. What we felt most was the injustice of painting everything 
black. 

As I have already said, there was a great deal in America to be 
criticized. Dickens's wrath about copyright was wholly justifiable. 
Our own literary possessions were still meager, and so we stood like 
highwaymen along the roadside of literature and robbed the pass- 
ersby, the very men who " helped us to enjoy life or taught us to 
endure it." It was utterly indefensible and wholly dishonest. The 
default on the State bonds, especially upon those of Pennsylvania, 
which edged the blade of Sydney Smith, who was a personal loser, 
was not only indefensible, but most discreditable. To the great re- 
proach of slavery there was, of course, no reply, no excuse to be made. 
But those dark spots were not the whole picture, and yet, by gross 
misrepresentation and even by actual falsehood, the effort was made 
to prove that everything was black. For instance, in Martin Chuzzle- 
wit the impression is sedulously and strongly given that the entire 
United States west of the Alleghanies is one huge swamp breathing 
forth fever and ague. No doubt such spots existed then, and exist 
now, but as a description of so large a country as the United States 
it was not strictly accurate. Yet such was the prevailing tone. 
Everything was bad — land, people, institutions. The result naturally 
was that the just criticism had no effect and was merely lost in the 
cloud of invective and abuse. Many of the deficiencies were those 
which time alone could supply, but this was not stated, any more than 
it was admitted that there was also in America much that was good 
and not a little that was great. In the days when we were still col- 
onies Edmund Burke and the elder Pitt pictured the people of 
America and what they had achieved in language to which Parlia-r 
ment listened then, and which the world has heeded ever since. In 
the first half of the nineteenth century the American people were en- 
gaged in the conquest of a continent; they were bringing a wilderness 
within the grasp of civilized man, and at the same time they were 
making a great experiment in government, and had established re- 
ligious freedom and individual liberty on a scale never known before. 
Their political example had affected the entire western world, and 
this was really the underlying reason for the attacks upon them, 
because their success alarmed the ruling classes of England and of 
Europe, which were likewise the vocal classes, in command of the 
press and the platform. None the less, these were things quite as 
H. Doc. 1268, 62-3 2 



18 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE. 

worthy of note as our crude manners, our rough ways on the western 
frontier, our lack of the luxuries of wealth, and of the many other 
lesser things in which we fell short of the European standards. But 
the good was never noticed and the bad was exaggerated beyond the 
bounds of truth. With the exception of what Dickens wrote, every- 
thing then said and written in regard to the United States and its 
people is quite forgotten, except by the historian, and is as dead to the 
world as the nun who has taken the black veil. 

But looking back over that time, the period of the English com- 
mentators on America, one can see very plainly now the infinite 
mischief which was done. In point of taste and good feeling there 
is little to choose between the English attacks upon the United States 
and those of Americans upon England, although we had the great 
disadvantage of feeling much more keenly about it than our adver- 
saries. Yet England herself was sensitive enough when Emerson 
and Hawthorne, two really great writers, ventured, in the most per- 
fectly proper and temperate way, to point out that in certain respects 
the English people were, after all, merely human. Emerson and 
Hawthorne, of course, are still read and remembered, quite as much 
as Dickens, but they do not come within the class that I have been 
trying to describe. They were later, and their tone was larger and 
more modern, their criticism more subtle, their praise ample, and 
their temper fair. During the time which I have attempted to por- 
tray the harm done was very great. Englishmen gave comparatively 
little attention to us or to what we thought or said, but the attacks 
of her writers upon the United States, running through a long period 
of years, bred a bitter hatred of England among the American people, 
which has gradually and fortunately turned into a cold indifference, 
and this, in turn, it is to be hoped, will become something more and 
better than occasional friendship between individual members of the 
two nations. The regret which one feels as one looks back over the 
writings of that period brimming over with bitterness and anger is 
enhanced by considering the good which might have been done by 
more serious works conceived in a different spirit. We have two con- 
spicuous examples of such books ready to our hands and possessed 
of an enduring reputation denied to those who wrote of the United 
States only to decry and wound. De Tocqueville . is of the same 
period. His famous book is by no means filled with undiluted praise. 
He both warned and criticized, but he took America seriously, and he 
was studied and admired. In our own time a distinguished English 
statesman has written a book upon our body politic and our methods 
of government. He has seen what was good as well as what was evil 
in our politics and our political system. He is a severe but just judge, 
Far from resenting his strictures, Americans regard his book with ad- 
miration and as high authority. It may be truly said that no English- 



ONE HUNDRED YEAES OF PEACE. 19 

man has ever been more popular in the United States than James 
Bryce, the author of the American Commonwealth. 

The British Government had ceased to aim deliberately at alienat- 
ing the United States after the treaty of Ghent was made ; and then 
it was that English writers, great and small, took up the work which 
the Government, for the time at least, had abandoned. Their opera- 
tions were less dangerous because the issues of peace and war did not 
lie in their hands; but in creating a settled hate on the part of one 
people for another they were more effective than diplomatists and 
ministers, because they wounded personal pride and made each mem- 
ber of the community feel humiliation or anger, according to his 
temperament, in his own particular person. To-day such writings 
on the part of the English or of any other nation would produce no 
effect of the slightest seriousness in the United States. After nations 
pass a certain point in their rise to greatness abuse by inhabitants of 
other countries may make the person uttering the abuse unpopular, 
but has less than no effect upon the nation or people abused. Between 
1820 and 1850, when the United States was still struggling in the 
first stages of nation building, when it was still largely a wilderness 
and its pioneers were forcing the frontier westward with daring and 
painful effort, this unmeasured abuse and savage criticism, whether 
just or not, was deeply felt. That it had an improving or instructive 
effect upon Americans, in view of the manner in which the instruction 
was administered, may well be doubted, but in making them angry 
and in turning them against England, and causing them to look with 
the friendly eyes of preference on almost every other nation, it was 
highly successful. In the relations of two great nations, speaking the 
same language and believing in the same political principles, it is not 
a pleasant period to look upon in the cold light of half a century later ; 
yet I think, if rightly considered, it is not without its lesson, not only 
to those concerned but to .all who wish to maintain good relations 
among the nations of the earth. 

During this same period, which may be called, as I have said, the 
period of the commentators and the critics, certain events occurred of 
a much more immediately serious nature, which brought the two coun- 
tries to the verge of war. In the nature of things we were certain 
to have many more matters of difference with Great Britain than with 
any other country, because her provinces lay to the north of the 
United States and furnished a common boundary line 3,000 miles in 
length. What was much worse was the fact that this boundary line 
was left largely unsettled by the treaties of 1818 and 1827. One of 
the three treaties of 1827 provided for arbitration as to the northeast 
boundary, and the question was referred to the King of Holland as 
arbitrator. In 1831 the king rendered a decision, but as he really 
decided only two points and merely expressed an opinion on all the 



20 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE. 

others, his award was rejected by the United States on the ground 
that it was not a decision of the questions submitted. Thus the entire 
matter was left open, and serious troubles soon began to arise on the 
northeastern boundary between the people of Maine on the one side 
and those of the adjoining British Provinces on the other. An 
American surveyor was arrested. The State of Maine appropriated 
money and sent a force of men in Aroostook County to the border. 
There were similar difficulties in Madawaska. The English Govern- 
ment postponed action, and the question began to assume a very angry 
and threatening appearance. Meanwhile another disturbance broke 
out along the New York and Vermont frontiers. There had been a 
rebellion in Canada against the bad government of that day, and 
the defeated patriots took refuge in the United States, where they 
met with a cordial reception. Considerable bodies of volunteers were 
raised. Secret organizations were formed to support the rebellious 
Canadians, a party of whom, under the leadership of William 
McKenzie, seized Navy Island, in the Niagara River, and fortified it. 
The authorities in Canada dispatched Col. McNab to guard the fron- 
tier against this invasion, and McNab sent out a party who seized 
and burned the steamer Caroline, which had been used to convey 
volunteers and munitions of war to Navy Island. The destruction 
of the Caroline took place at Fort Schlosser, on American territory, 
and was, of course, a gross violation of the sovereignty of the United 
States. The Government of the United States and the State govern- 
ments behaved with entire propriety and broke up and checked, so far 
as they could, the movements of the patriots and their sympathizers. 
Nevertheless, acts of violence continued on both sides. A party of 
refugees in the Thousand Islands crossed to the Canadian side and 
burned the steamer Sir Robert Peel as a set-off for the Caroline, 
while the American steamer Telegraph was fired upon. It would 
require a volume of reasonable size to give a history of these border 
troubles, which are not without much human interest, but which 
have all fallen quite dim now, and which are hardly remembered 
except by the historian. In a brief review of the relations of England 
and the United States during 100 years it is impossible to do more 
than allude to them. It must suffice to say here that the whole 
border from Maine to Michigan was not only disturbed, but in a 
most inflamed and explosive condition. It was just one of those 
situations where war might have been precipitated at any moment by 
reckless men who were quarreling over the possession of land and 
where a rebellion existed in one country which excited warm sym- 
pathy in the other. In addition a case arose, growing out of the 
destruction of the Caroline, which aroused animosities even more 
than the actual troubles along the border. An American named 
Durfee had been shot and killed on the Caroline. Two years later 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE. 21 

a Canadian named Alexander McLeod came down from Canada and 
while he was drunk bragged of having himself killed Durfee. He 
was, of course, arrested, although it was afterwards shown that he 
had not been present at the destruction of the Caroline. But on his 
own admission it was perfectly proper to arrest him. The crime 
had been committed on American soil and McLeod had confessed 
himself to be the guilty man, yet none the less the English Govern- 
ment flew into a great rage and undertook to interfere with the 
action of the courts. Not content with this, it also saw fit to offer 
its advice in regard to the case of the Amistad, a Spanish vessel 
which had been seized by the slaves which she was carrying and had 
been run ashore at Long Island, where she was taken possession of 
by the Government. There was a very serious question as to what 
was to be done with the negroes, but no part of the question concerned 
England the least in the world, and her benevolent advice, coming 
just at that moment, was deeply resented. In this condition of public 
sentiment, with England on the edge of declaring war on account of 
McLeod, and with the popular feeling in the United States greatly 
excited by the border troubles and the case of the Amis tad, the Demo- 
crats went out of power and the Whigs came in, with Mr. Webster 
as Secretary of State. The situation was one of extreme and dan- 
gerous complexity. The British having avowed the destruction of 
the Caroline to be a governmental act, it was obvious that McLeod 
could not properly be held, but his case was in the State courts of 
New York, over the proceedings of which the United States had no 
control. Mr. Webster endeavored to secure the discharge of McLeod, 
but in vain, and the New York courts refused to grant a writ of 
habeas corpus. On the other side, Mr. Fox, the British minister, saw 
fit to adopt a most offensive tone, which Mr. Webster was the last 
man in the world to submit to tamely. He took a firm attitude with 
England, while suggesting privately that negotiations should be 
opened for establishing a conventional northeastern line, and, as has 
just been said, he used his best efforts to secure the discharge of 
McLeod. This perilous situation was fortunately relieved by two 
incidents which came to pass outside the efforts of the Government. 
McLeod was acquitted at Utica by the simple process of proving an 
alibi ; and the Whigs were beaten in England, an event which made 
Lord Aberdeen secretary of state for foreign affairs in place of Lord 
Palmerston. As has usually happened since the War of 1812, we 
fared much better with a Tory or Conservative administration than 
we did with the Whigs and the Liberals. Response was now made 
to Mr. Webster's proposal to establish a conventional line, and in 
January, 1842, information reached Mr. Webster from Mr. Everett 
that Lord Aberdeen had determined to assent to our proposition, 
and had sent Lord Ashburton as special minister to the United States 



22 ONE HUNDEED YEAES OF PEACE. 

to settle the boundary and all outstanding questions. This marked a 
sharp change in the English attitude, and was no doubt owing, in a 
measure at least, to the confidence which was felt in Mr. Webster 
personally. Indeed, it is to Mr. Webster that we owe the settlement 
at that time of questions which had been so inflamed by extraneous 
and accidental circumstances that they had brought the two coun- 
tries to the verge of war. 

Mr. Webster's position had throughout been one of extreme diffi- 
culty. Not only did he have to deal with the McLeod case, but the 
border was in a constant ferment and he was compelled to be con- 
stantly on the alert to prevent, if possible, outbreaks which might 
precipitate hostilities at any moment. In addition to all this his own 
personal situation was most trying. Gen. Harrison, who had made 
him Secretary of State, died a month after his inauguration, and, 
although President Tyler gave his entire confidence to Mr. Webster, 
he immediately broke with the Whig Party, which had elected him, 
and Mr. Webster's position became, in consequence, a very difficult 
one. The Whigs felt that he ought immediately to resign. He was 
denounced as a traitor to Whig principles, and there was much bitter- 
ness of feeling. Mr. Webster, however, understood the situation 
between this country and Great Britain better than anyone else. He 
knew how dangerous it was. He felt, and rightly, that if. anyone 
could bring it to a peaceful conclusion he could, and that whatever 
his party associates might say or think it was his plain duty to remain 
in the Cabinet until the English question was settled. Unmoved, 
therefore, by the attacks made upon him, he remained at his post, and 
it was well for the country that he did so. Lord Ashburton arrived 
in the United States on the 4th of April, 1842, and the result of his 
negotiations with the Secretary of State was the agreement known 
in history as the Webster- Ashburton treaty, which was concluded on 
the 9th of August, 1842, and proclaimed in the following November. 
This result, however, was not easily reached, for the settlement was 
surrounded by difficulties, owing to the fact that the territory of the 
two States of Maine and Massachusetts was involved, and Webster 
could not deal with this territory, therefore, with a free hand. It was 
very fortunate that Mr. Webster was a New England man, and his 
personal influence as well as the tact he displayed was most effective 
in managing the arrangements with the two States. It is not possible 
to follow the negotiations in their details, for the discussion involved 
filled volumes at the time and might be made to fill volumes now. 
All that it is possible to say here is that the treaty brought about, in 
the first place, a condition of entire peace between the two countries 
and thus put an end to one in which war was momentarily probable. 
It settled the northeastern boundary and the northern boundary from 
Lake Huron to the Lake of the Woods, together with various matters 



ONE HUNDRED YEAES OF PEACE. 23 

related to these two questions. It also made an agreement for joint 
effort toward the suppression of the slave trade and for joint remon- 
strances to the other powers against that traffic. It further provided 
in another article for the extradition of criminals. As a whole the 
treaty was a most important advance toward the establishment of 
good relations between the two branches of the English-speaking 
people. It was one of Mr. Webster's greatest achievements, and, in 
view of the extreme irritation existing and the incipient border war- 
fare, it was a very remarkable feat. Benton denounced the treaty in 
the Senate as a surrender to England, and Lord Palmerston de- 
nounced it in Parliament as a surrender by England to the United 
States; from which it may be inferred that it was, on the whole, a 
very fair settlement. 

The Webster- Ashburton treaty had, however, one defect ; it did not 
settle our northwestern boundary beyond the Rocky Mountains. That 
region, it will be remembered, under the treaties of 1818 and 1827 
was left to the joint occupation of Great Britain and the United 
States, although Mr. Monroe had offered to settle the question by 
adopting the forty-ninth parallel as the line of division. The country 
remained unoccupied, but the Hudson Bay Co. began to push its 
posts down to the Columbia River, and just when Mr. Webster was 
at work on the treaty with Lord Ashburton the American movement 
toward Oregon began in earnest. As soon as our settlers arrived there 
troubles at once arose, and the question drifted into the domain of 
politics. The failure of the Webster- Ashburton treaty to deal with it 
and the absorption of the administration in the much greater question 
of the annexation of Texas kept the whole matter open, with increas- 
ing irritation, although Mr. Tyler renewed the offer of the forty-ninth 
parallel, to which Great Britain paid no attention. The American 
rights and claims were taken up with noisy enthusiasm in different 
parts of the country, and were put forward by public meetings in 
the largest possible way. When the election of 1844 came on, the 
Democrats took extreme ground in their platform, claiming the whole 
region which was in dispute, and the the cry of " Fifty-four forty or 
fight " ran through the campaign. The excitement was enhanced by 
the failure of Congress to act, for there were many Senators and 
Representatives from the older parts of the country who regarded 
Oregon as worthless, and who resisted all efforts to take action in 
regard to it. Mr. Polk, the Democratic candidate, was one of the 
extremists on the question and in favor of the 54-40 line. Nothing 
could have been less desirable than this attitude. It is never well to 
threaten, and it is particularly undesirable to threaten unless you 
mean just what you say. The people who were responsible for the 
cry of " Fifty-four forty or fight *' did not really mean to fight for 
that line, and therefore the cry was mere bluster for political pur- 



24 ONE HUNDEED YEAES OF PEACE. 

poses. It had, however, the effect of inflaming the question, so that 
there was talk of war on both sides of the Atlantic. When Mr. Polk 
came in, he took very extreme ground in his inaugural, and this had a 
still worse effect in England, and increased the difficulty of a settle- 
ment. After all his bluster, however, Polk, with the very lame excuse 
that he was involved by the acts of his predecessor, renewed the offer 
of the forty-ninth parallel, which Mr. Pakenham, the British minis- 
ter, who was apparently about as judicious as Polk, promptly, and as 
it afterward appeared, without authority, declined. President Polk 
in his message asked Congress for authority to terminate the con- 
vention of 1827. Resolutions were passed and the convention was 
terminated. The situation had now become so threatening that Mr. 
Webster made a strong speech at Boston in which he denounced the 
folly of going to war with England on such a question and urged its 
proper settlement. The speech made a- deep impression not only in 
England and America, but in Europe. Pakenham, under instruc- 
tions from the ministry, then renewed on his side the offer of the' 
forty-ninth parallel, and the valiant Polk accepted it with the approval 
of Congress. The treaty of 1846 followed, by which the line to the 
coast was settled. We obtained the Oregon country and granted to 
Great Britain the right of navigation on the Columbia River. The 
loss of the region between the forty-ninth parallel and the line of 
54-40 was one of the most severe which ever befell the United States. 
Whether it could have been obtained without a war is probabty doubt- 
ful, but it never ought to have been said, officially or otherwise, that 
we would fight for 54—40 unless we were fully prepared to do so. 
If we had stood firm for the line of 54^L0 without threats, it is quite 
possible that we might have succeeded in the end ; but the hypotheses 
of history are of little practical value, and the fact remains that by 
the treaty we lost a complete control of the Pacific coast. 

It is impossible, nor is it necessary, here to enter into the contro- 
versies which arose from the annexation of Texas and in which Eng- 
land took no little interest, but the great movement of expansion 
which characterized that period brought on another question with 
England which at one time was very serious and which resulted in a 
treaty that was for many years a stumbling block in the way of all 
plans for building an Isthmian canal. From the time of Monroe, 
Clay, and John Quincy Adams the construction of an interoceanic 
canal had been one of the cherished desires of the United States. It 
passed through many phases, involved as it was in the tortuous and 
revolutionary conditions of Central America, but the question finally 
came to a head after the annexation of Texas. Great Britain had 
always, despite treaties to the contrar} 7 , maintained a hold on the 
Mosquito coast, and was in the habit of exercising a protectorate over 
a person whom she humorously called the " Mosquito King," selected 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE. 25 

from the worthless savages who inhabited that region. She now took 
advantage of this interest in the Mosquito coast to take possession of 
San Juan, which was at the mouth of the river where it was planned 
to begin the Nicaragua Canal. On the other hand, the United States 
engaged in the work of making arrangements with the Central 
American Republics and with Granada to get possession of the canal 
routes. It is not necessary to follow the treaties made by Mr. Hise 
and later by Mr. Squier in which they exceeded their instructions and 
secured for us everything we desired. With England at the mouth of 
the San Juan and indulging herself in the seizure of Tigre Island 
and with the United States possessed of treaties entered into by the 
people of the countries through which the canal must pass, all the 
conditions were ripe for a very pretty quarrel, which thereupon duly 
arose. There is no necessitv of following it in all its intricacies, but 
the result was a treaty hastily made by Sir Henry Bulwer, the British 
minister, and Mr. .Clayton, Secretary of State, in order to prevent 
action upon the Squier treaty by the Senate. 

The treaty thus made in 1850 provided that neither the United 
States nor Great Britain should ever obtain or maintain for them- 
selves any exclusive control over the ship canal, or maintain any for- 
tifications, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa 
Rica, the Mosquito coast, or any part of Central America. The treaty 
further provided for the neutrality of the canal in case of war and 
for the protection of its construction, which both powers promised to 
facilitate. It also arranged for guarantees of neutrality and for invi- 
tations to other powers to cooperate. This agreement settled the out- 
standing differences between England and the United States, but it 
was pregnant with other difficulties hardly less serious. In its nature 
it was an abandonment of the Monroe Doctrine, for it provided for 
bringing in European powers to deal with a purely American ques- 
tion, and it made it impossible for either the United States or Great 
Britain to build a canal without mutual cooperation. In process of 
time it became necessary to get rid of this treaty, which was not a wise 
one except so far as it removed a subject of great irritation at the 
moment. 

This immediate effect it certainly had, and the next transaction be- 
tween the two Governments was the treaty of 1854, which established 
reciprocity with Canada, and which, as was said at the time, was 
floated through by Lord Elgin upon seas of champagne. Although 
this treaty in its practical operation proved a disappointment to the 
United States, it was at least a distinctly friendly arrangement, and 
indicates how much relations between the United States and Great 
Britain, despite many vicissitudes, had improved since the War of 
1812. This was shown even more emphatically a few years later when 
the Prince of Wales, then a bov of 18. came to the United States in 



26 ONE HUNDRED YEAES OP PEACE. 

the j^ear 1860. Although the fateful election of that year was in 
progress and the country was torn by the political conflict, the prince 
was received with the utmost cordiality by every one in authority 
from the President down and with real enthusiasm by the people. 
That he carried away pleasant memories of America was made evi- 
dent throughout his life, and especially after he came to the throne, 
by his kindliness and friendship not only toward the United States, 
but toward all Americans. What was more important at the time, 
the warmth of his reception in the United States deeply gratified the 
Queen and Prince Albert, and was not without a marked influence a 
year later when the relations of the two countries and the fate of the 
American Union were trembling in the balance. 

The Elgin treaty, and, still more, the visit of the Prince of Wales 
just on the eve of the Civil War, came at a time when the people of 
the United States were so deeply absorbed in the slavery question at 
home that they had little thought to give to their relations with any 
foreign country. The passions aroused by the slavery struggle were 
rising to a fierce intensity and the dark clouds of secession and civil 
war were already gathering upon the horizon. With the coming of 
that war all that had been gained in the past years toward the estab- 
lishment of permanent and really friendly relations between the two 
countries, which had been severed by the American Revolution, was 
lost in a moment. During the years which had elapsed between 1815 
and 1860 the most severe reproach uttered by English lips against the 
United States was the continued maintenance of negro slavery. The 
reproach was bitterly felt because no answer, no explanation, no de- 
fense, was possible. Now the United States was plunged in civil war 
waged by the North for the preservation of the Union, and all the 
world knew that the cause of the North carried with it freedom to the 
slaves. The people of the Northern States felt that under these cir- 
cumstances and in that hour of trial the sympathy of England would 
go out to them at once without either question or hesitation. To their 
intense surprise, the feeling in England, as expressed in her magazines 
and neAvspapers and by the governing classes, was uniformly hostile. 
The vocal part of English society seemed to be wholly in sympathy 
with the South, and the North could not learn until later that the 
silent masses of England were on the side of the Union and freedom. 
The bitterness of hatred awakened by the utterances of the English 
press and English public men can hardly be realized to-day. Early 
in the struggle its intensity was manifested when the Trent affair 
occurred. The act of Wilkes in stopping the Trent and taking from 
her the Southern commissioners was entirely indefensible from our 
point of view because it was a flat contradiction of the American 
doctrine for which the country had fought in 1812. Yet in 1861 
the people of the Northern States hailed the action of Wilkes with 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE. 27 

wild delight, and the hatred aroused by the English attitude was so 
great that they were quite ready to go to war, although war at that 
moment probably meant the establishment of the Confederacy and 
the final severance of the Union. This feeling was rife not only 
among the people of the North, but among public men in Wash- 
ington. The attitude of England in regard to the Trent affair was 
not calculated to improve the situation, and yet, in all candor, it must 
be said that it is difficult to see how England could have assumed any 
other position than that which she actually took, although by doing 
so she utterly rejected the doctrine which she upheld and enforced 
during the first 15 years of the century. Fortunately, in his large 
and patient wisdom, President Lincoln was able to suppress the very 
natural feeling which he shared with his people, and, looking beyond 
the passions of the moment, had the courage to withdraw from the 
untenable situation created by the action of Wilkes. On the other 
hand, English ministers who were only too ready to take advantage 
of the Trent affair in order to precipitate a war which would have 
insured the destruction of the United States were sufficiently influ- 
enced by the wise counsels of Prince Albert, acting through the 
Queen, by whom American kindness to the Prince of Wales was still 
freshly remembered, to modify a dispatch which, if unaltered, would 
almost certainly have brought on war and the establishment of the 
Confederacy. Lincoln gave up Mason and Slidell ; and the country, 
unconvinced, accepted his action. The feeling of the people was 
exactly expressed in Lowell's lines : 

We give the critters back, John, 

Cos Abram thought 'twas right; 
It warn't your bullying clack, John, 

Provokin' us to fight. 
Ole Uncle S. sez he, " I guess 
We've a hard row," sez he, 

" To hoe jest now ; but thet somehow 
May happen to J. B. 

Ez wal ez you an' me." 

The avoidance by Lincoln's action, of this great peril did not, how- 
ever, alter — on the contrary, it intensified — the hostile feeling of the 
loyal people of the North toward England, nor was there anything 
in the utterances or conduct of those who spoke for England calcu- 
lated to produce a change. The villification of the United States 
and her President and of all her leaders and soldiers in the magazines 
and newspapers went on without ceasing and without modification. 
From British ports and British shipyards armed vessels slipped 
away which, although nominally ships of the Confederate navy, 
pursued in reality a simple career of privateering closely akin to 
piracy. The only one of them which actually came into action was 



28 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE. 

destroyed by the Kearsarge, and an English yacht rescued the South- 
ern officers and the British crew of the sinking Alabama. This 
business of furnishing a Confederate navy from the ports and ship- 
yards of a neutral country went on with the covert support of the 
British cabinet until the case of the Laird rams was reached. Pro- 
tests even then were in vain, and it was not until Mr. Adams wrote 
down the famous words, " It is superfluous in me to point out to your 
lordship that this is war," that the rams were stopped and English 
ports ceased to send forth privateers. In the great life-and-death 
struggle in which the people of the United States were then engaged 
the loss of some merchant ships on the high seas was an injury so 
comparatively trifling in its effect upon the result that it was hardly 
perceptible ; but the course of England which permitted the destruc- 
tion of merchant vessels in this way was, in the eyes of the American 
people, a crime of the first magnitude. The leaders of the British 
cabinet were not friendly, although Lord Palmerston, fortunately 
for us, was more indifferent and less actively hostile than was gen- 
erally supposed, and neither he nor Lord John Russell, who was 
much less friendly, was disposed to precipitate war. The one out- 
spoken champion of the Confederacy was Gladstone; but fate so 
willed it that in striving to harm the United States he rendered it a 
great and decisive service. It was in the autumn of 1862, a very 
dark hour in the fortunes of the United States. The ministry were 
preparing to recognize the Confederacy. The Queen, since the death 
of Prince Albert, as Mr. Charles Francis Adams has recently shown, 
had ceased to interest herself in American affairs. A cabinet meet- 
ing was called for October 23, and then the recognition of the Con- 
federacy was to be given. On the 7th of October Mr. Gladstone, 
anticipating the action of the Cabinet, went to Newcastle and deliv- 
ered the famous speech in which he declared that " Jefferson Davis 
had made a nation." Lord Palmerston saw his successor in Glad- 
stone, but he had no intention of letting him rule before his time. 
He resented the Newcastle speech; he did not propose to have Mr. 
Gladstone force his hand, and a week later he sent Sir George Lewis 
down to Hereford to controvert and disavow the Newcastle utter- 
ances. The Cabinet meeting on the 23d was postponed, but the 
accepted time had passed, and never returned. Mr. Gladstone's 
speech, however, did its work in the United States, still further 
embittering the already intense and deep-seated enmity toward 
England and her Government. We had friends, it is true — some 
even in the Cabinet, like Sir George Lewis — but the general attitude 
of the English ministry was such that, while it inflamed the enmity 
of the North, it was far from gaining the friendship of the South, 
because; while the South Avas amused with sympathetic expressions 
and encouraged to hope for substantial support, it never received 



ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE. 29 

anything of real value, thus being left with an unpleasant sense of 
having been betrayed. A system more nicely calculated to incur the 
hostility of both sides in the great quarrel could not have been 
imagined, and it does not seem unjust to suggest that such a system 
did not imply a very high order of intelligence. Only very slowly 
and entirely outside the Government did it become apparent that 
the Union and freedom had any friends in England. The first public 
man to declare for the North was Richard Cobden, and he was fol- 
lowed by John Bright, whose powerful and most eloquent speech on 
the Roebuck resolution was one of the greatest services rendered by 
any man, not an American, to the cause of the Union. Lord Hough- 
ton, then Monckton Milnes, also spoke for us in the House of Com- 
mons. Mr. Forster was our friend, so were John Stuart Mill, Gold- 
win Smith, and Thomas Hughes; and there were others, of course, 
like these men, whose support it was an honor to possess. 

The workingmen of Lancashire, reduced to misery by the cotton 
famine, were none the less true in their sympathy for the cause which 
they believed to be that of human rights and human freedom. But 
these voices, potent as they were, were lost in the general clamor 
which arose from the clubs at London, from the newspapers, and 
from the reviews. The desire to side actively with the South 
declined, of course, as the fortunes of the Confederacy sank, but the 
contemptuous abuse of the North went on without abatement. Even 
so late as the last year of the war as clever a man as Charles Lever 
demonstrated, in Blackwood's Magazine, to his own satisfaction, the 
folly and absurdity of Sherman's great movement. The article 
appeared just in time to greet Sherman as he emerged triumphant at 
Savannah. 

Sherman's march to the sea, following jeers and predictions like 
those put forth by Lever, produced a profound impression in Eng- 
land, which then, at last, seemed to become dimly conscious that a 
great war had been fought out by great armies. The„ end of the war 
and the complete triumph of the Union cause soon followed. As in 
games, so in more serious things, Englishmen are excellent winners, 
but, as a rule, poor losers, apt to cry out, when they have lost, that 
there has been something unfair and to try to belittle and explain 
away their adversary's victory. In this case, however, England 
showed herself a good loser, for the result was too serious to be treated 
with contempt or with charges of unfairness. Moreover, England 
found herself confronted not only by the success of the United States, 
and the consequent consolidation of the Union, but by a very unfor- 
tunate situation which she had herself created. She had managed to 
secure the bitter hostility of both sides. She had given sympathy to 
the South, but had done nothing practical for the cause of the Con- 
federacy, and at the same time she had outraged the feelings of the 



30 ONE HUNDRED YEAES OF PEACE. 

Northern people and developed among them a bitterness and dislike 
which, when they were flushed with victory, might easily have had 
most serious consequences. It is quite true that she had not behaved 
so badly toward the United States as France, which had stopped 
just short of war. When England, France, and Spain united to 
exact reparation from Mexico, England and Spain withdrew as soon 
as they discovered that France intended to establish a government of 
her own creation on Mexican soil. Not only was the French Govern- 
ment sympathetic with the South, but Napoleon was more than 
anxious to recognize the Confederacy, and took advantage of our 
Civil War to fit out the Mexican expedition and establish Maximilian 
as Emperor. As soon as the war was over we forced France out of 
Mexico, and the unfortunate Maximilian, an amiable and brave man, 
but of less than mediocre capacity, was executed bjr his subjects and 
offered up as a sacrifice to his incautious reliance upon the French 
Emperor and to his own ignorance of the peril of infringing the 
Monroe doctrine. 

Yet, despite all this, the people of the United States cared very 
little about what France had done and felt bitterly all that the 
English had said. The attitude of the French Government during 
our Civil War, which there is no reason to suppose was the attitude 
of the French people, no doubt caused Americans generally to sym- 
pathize with Germany in the war of 1870, but except for that 
sympathy we regarded with great indifference the French treat- 
ment of the United States during the Civil War. Very different 
was the relation to England. As soon as the war was over the era 
of apology began on the part of England, finding its first expression 
in Tom Taylor's well-known verses upon the death of Lincoln. The 
acknowledgment of their mistakes, however, produced but slight 
impression in the United States, where there was a universal deter- 
mination to exact due reparation for the conduct of England, and 
especially for the depredations of the Alabama and the other cruisers 
let loose from British shipyards to prey upon our commerce. At- 
tempts were at once made to settle these differences, but the Johnson- 
Clarendon treaty was rejected by the Senate, and when Grant came 
to the Presidency there was a strong feeling, represented by Mr. 
Sumner, in favor of making no demands on England, but of obtain- 
ing our redress by taking possession of Canada. With a veteran 
Army of a million men and a Navy of over 700 vessels, including 
some 70 ironclads, the task would not have been a difficult one. Presi- 
dent Grant and Mr. Fish, however, decided upon another course, and 
were really unwilling to adopt a policy which, however justifiable, 
might have carried the country into another war. The result was 
that England sent out a special commission to Washington to make 
a treaty. Mr. Gladstone, who was then Prime Minister, behaved 



ONE HUNDRED YEAES OF PEACE. 31 

with manliness and courage. He admitted frankly the great mistake 
he had made in his Newcastle speech and bent all his energies to 
reaching a settlement with the United States which would satisfy 
Americans and so far as possible heal the wounds inflicted by Eng- 
land's attitude and by English utterances during the war. In the 
first article of the treaty of 1871, which followed, it is said: 

Her Britannic Majesty has authorized her high commissioners and plenipo- 
tentiaries to express in a friendly spirit the regret felt by Her Majesty's Gov- 
ernment for the escape under any circumstances of the Alabama and other 
vessels from British ports and for the depredations committed by those vessels. 

It must have been a serious trial not only for a ministry but for 
a proud and powerful nation thus formally and officially to apologize 
for its past conduct, and yet, unless England was ready for war 
and for the loss of Canada, no other method seemed possible. It is 
greatly to England's credit and to the credit of the Government of 
that day that they were willing to express their regret for having 
done wrong. 

The treaty established a court of arbitration to consider and pass 
upon the claims. It also provided for referring the differences in 
regard to the line of our boundary through the Fuca Straits to the 
Emperor of Germany, who subsequently made an award wholly in 
favor of the United States. The treaty also dealt with many other 
questions, including fishery rights, the navigation of the St. Law- 
rence and of Lake Michigan, the use of canals, and the conveyance 
of merchandise in bond through the United States. In due course 
the claims were taken before the Geneva tribunal. The arbitration 
came dangerously near shipwreck, owing to the projection into it 
of the indirect claims, so called, which were urged in a powerful 
speech by Mr. Sumner in the Senate, but the tribunal wisely excluded 
them, and the case came to a decision, an award of $15,500,000 being 
made to the United States for the damages caused by the Alabama 
and her sister ships. 

So far as the official relations of the two countries were concerned, 
the treaty of Washington restored them to the situation which had 
existed before the Civil War. Once again we were, officially speak- 
ing, on good and friendly terms with Great Britain, but the feeling- 
left among the people of the United States by England's attitude 
remained unchanged, and the harsh and bitter things which had 
been said in England during our days of trial and suffering still 
rankled deeply. This was something which only the passage of time 
could modify, and the wounds which had been made took long to 
heal, although the healing process was facilitated by the fact that 
the Civil War had made the people of the United States profoundly 
indifferent to foreign criticism. There was, moreover, no clash be- 



32 ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF PEACE. 

tween the countries until many years after the treaty of Washing- 
ton; and when the next difficulty arose it came not from any im- 
mediate difference between England and the United States, but grew 
out of an English invasion of the Monroe Doctrine in South America. 
For many years there had been a dispute between England and 
Venezuela as to the boundary between that country and the posses- 
sions of England in British Guiana. Venezuela, weak and distracted 
by revolution, had sought more than once for arbitration, which 
England would not grant. On the contrary, the British Government 
had steadily pushed its line forward and extended its claims until 
it was found that it was gradually absorbing a large part of what 
had always been considered Venezuelan territory. Venezuela had 
broken off diplomatic relations, but nothing had succeeded in check- 
ing the English advances. The offer of the good offices of the United 
States had been equally fruitless, and finally the matter reached a 
crisis, and Mr. Cleveland, on December 17, 1895, sent in his famous 
message. After reviewing the Venezuelan question and the efforts 
that we had made toward a peaceful settlement, the President recom- 
mended that an American commission be appointed to examine the 
question and report upon the matter. He said that when such report 
was made " it would be the duty of the United States to resist by 
every means in its power as a willful aggression upon its rights and 
interests the appropriation by Great Britain of any lands or the 
exercise of governmental jurisdiction over any territory which after 
investigation we have determined of right belongs to Venezuela." 
The message concluded with the following sentence : 

I am, nevertheless, firm in my conviction that, while it is a grievous thing 
to contemplate the two great English-speaking peoples of the world as being 
otherwise than friendly competitors in the onward march of civilization and 
strenuous and worthy rivals in all the arts of peace, there is no calamity which 
a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission 
to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and 
honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people's safety and greatness. 

The language employed by the President was vigorous and deter- 
mined. At the time it was thought rough. England was surprised, 
and operators in the stock market were greatly annoyed. The closing 
words of the message, which was a very able one, do not seem quite so 
harsh to-day as they did at the time when they were read to Con- 
gress. President Cleveland, moreover, however much Wall Street 
might cry out, had the country with him, and no one to-day, I think,' 
can question the absolute soundness of his position. 

With the possessions of any European power in the Western Hemi- 
sphere we, of course, did not meddle, but it was the settled policy 
of the country that those possessions should not be extended or new 
ones created. The forcible seizure of American territory by a Euro- 



OXE HUNDRED YEAES OF PEACE. 33 

pean power aa-ouIc! be, of course, an obvious violation of the Monroe 
Doctrine, which this country believes essential to its safety; but the 
gradual grasping of American territory on the basis of shadowy, 
undetermined, and constantly widening claims differed from forcible 
seizure only in degree. If the land in dispute belonged to Great 
Britain we had nothing whatever to say, but so long as it was in 
controversy the United States had the right to demand that that 
controversy should be settled by a proper tribunal under whose 
decision the world should know just what belonged to England and 
Avhat to Venezuela. President Cleveland's strong declaration sur- 
prised England, but it brought her to terms. She woke up to the 
fact that the day had long since passed when the United States 
could be trifled with on any American question, and the soundness 
of Mr. Cleveland's judgment was shown by the fact that within 
a year the question was referred to a tribunal which met in Paris 
and which consisted of two Americans, two Englishmen, and one 
Russisfti jurist. The American judges were Chief Justice Fuller 
and Mr. Justice Brewer, of the Supreme Court. They went to Paris 
with the somewhat innocent idea that they were to hear the case 
and decide it on its merits, exactly as they decided a case in their 
oAvn Supreme Court. They found, however, that the two English 
judges had no such conception of their functions, but were there as 
representatiA-es of England, holding the positions of advocates instead 
of judges. The result was that the decision rested with the fifth 
man, Mr. Martens, and he, apparently under instructions not strictly 
judicial, was prepared to decide entirely in faA^or of England, 
although the English case for a large part of the claim was of the 
most shadoAvy character. It Avas very important, hoAvever, to Eng- 
land that the award should be signed by all the arbitrators, and 
that which Avas most essential to Venezuela was to preserve her 
control of the mouths of the Orinoco. The American arbitrators 
consented to sign the award if the mouths of the Orinoco were 
left to Venezuela : and this was done, all the rest of the disputed 
territory going to England. If the rest of the territory belonged 
to England, the mouths of the Orinoco also should have been hers. 
If the mouths of the Orinoco belonged to Venezuela, England was 
not entitled to a large part of what she receiA r ed. In other words, 
the judgment of the arbitral tribunal was a compromise and not a 
decision on the merits of the case, in which it followed the course 
of most arbitrations and disclosed the Aveakness of which arbitral 
tribunals have hitherto nearly always been guilty. This failing is 
that they do not decide a case on its merits, but make a diplomatic 
compromise, giving something to each side. It is this tendency or 
practice of arbitral tribunals AAdiich has caused them to be distrusted, 
and especially in the United States, because while the United States 
H. Doc. 126S. 62-3 3 



34 ONE HUNDKED YEARS OF PEACE. 

has no questions in Europe, Europe has many questions of interest 
in the Western Hemisphere, and the result has been on more occa- 
sions than one that the United States has been drawn into an arbi- 
tration where it could gain nothing and was certain to lose if any 
compromise was effected. In this particular instance, however, the 
result which Mr. Cleveland desired and which he sought to reach 
by his message was fully attained. The boundary was determined, 
the process of gradual encroachment on a weak American State under 
cover of claims more or less artificial and advanced by a powerful 
European nation was stopped, and an end was put once and for all 
to the plan of securing new American possessions by the insidious 
method of starting and developing claims and then refusing to have 
the claims settled and boundaries determined by any tribunal. Mr. 
Cleveland rendered a very great public service by his action, and 
caused the powers of Europe to understand and appreciate the force 
and meaning of the Monroe Doctrine as they had never done before. 

Three years after President Cleveland's Venezuelan message the 
United States was at war with Spain. Admiral Dewey's fleet had 
captured Manila, and the great European powers hastened to send 
warships to the scene of action. Some of these vessels were more 
powerful than any which Admiral Dewey had in his fleet, and the 
German admiral behaved in a way which came very near bringing 
on serious trouble between his country and the United States. Ad- 
miral Dewey's firmness put an end to the disagreeable attitude of 
the Germans ; but he also received assurances of support from Capt. 
Chichester, in command of the English ships, which were of great 
value. This almost open act of friendliness, which recalled the old 
days in China when Commodore Tatnall went to the aid of the Eng- 
glish, declaring that "blood was thicker than water," was merely 
representative of the attitude of the English Government. The sym- 
pathies of Europe were with Spain, but England stood by the United 
States, and this fact did more to wipe out the past and make the re- 
lations between the two countries what they should have been long 
before than all the years which had elapsed since the bitter days of 
the Civil War. 

England's attitude, moreover, toward the United States during 
the War with Spain was only a part of the general policy of the Gov- 
ernment then in control. When the Panama Canal, the interest in 
which had been steadily growing, reached a point where the United 
States was determined that the canal should be built, it was found 
that the Clayton-Bulwer treaty was a stumblingblock to any move- 
ment on the part of the United States. The American feeling was 
so strong that Congress was only too ready to abrogate the treaty by 
its own action; but, the question being brought to the attention of 
Lord Salisbury, the English Government showed itself more than 



ONE HUXDBED YEAES OF PEACE. 35 

willing to join with the United States in superseding the Clayton- 
Bnlwer treaty by a new one under which the United States should 
have a free hand in dealing with the canal. The first Hay-Paunce- 
fote treaty failed, owing chiefly to having incorporated in it a pro- 
vision by which it was agreed that the powers of Europe should be 
entitled to join in the neutralization of the canal. This, on our 
part, was of course inviting the destruction of the Monroe Doctrine, 
and the Senate amended the treaty. England refused to accept the 
Senate amendments, but proceeded to make with us a second treaty 
which conformed to the changes proposed by the Senate and which 
was ratified without opposition. 

The policy manifested by the attitude of England in regard to 
the canal question, which had followed upon the end of the Spanish 
War, was closely followed, and was indeed enlarged, by Mr. Bal- 
four when he succeeded Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister. Presi- 
dent McKinley, in his desire to settle all possible outstanding ques- 
tions with Great Britain — questions which related entirely to Can- 
ada — had brought about a meeting of an Anglo-American commis- 
sion in Washington. It became evident that all questions could be 
easily arranged, with the exception of the Alaskan boundary, and 
upon that the difference was so sharp that the commission adjourned 
without having reached any conclusions at all in any direction. All 
the other differences remained in abeyance, but the Alaskan question 
became constantly more perilous. Nations, like men, will fight about 
the possession of land when they will fight about nothing else, and 
the Alaskan question, which caused a great deal of feeling in the 
Northwest, was rapidly approaching the dangerous stage. A treaty 
to submit the boundary of Alaska to an international tribunal, con- 
sisting of three Americans and three representatives of Canada and 
Great Britain, was made and ratified in 1903. The English repre- 
sentatives were two distinguished Canadians and Lord Alverstone, 
the Lord Chief Justice of England. The case was fully argued, and 
the .decision was almost wholly in favor of the contention of the 
United States, which was owing to the action of Lord Alverstone, 
who decided in the main against the Canadian claim. 

Thus the one question which was pregnant with real danger was 
eliminated, and the other differences with Canada were rapidly dis- 
posed of in the succeeding years of President Eoosevelt's adminis- 
tration while Mr. Eoot was Secretary of State. One treaty settled 
the international boundary, another provided for the protection of 
the fisheries on the Lakes, another for the international waterways, 
and, finally, the long-contested question of our rights in the New- 
foundland fisheries went to The Hague for determination under a 
treaty framed by Mr. Root. 



36 



ONE HUNDRED YEAKS OF PEACE. 



All these important agreements which made for the best relations 
between Great Britain and the United States grew out of the atti- 
tude of England at the time of the Spanish War, and were due to the 
policy of which Mr. Balfour in particular, and Lord Lansdowne, the 
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Avere the chief exponents. In 
a speech at Manchester Mr. Balfour said : 

The time may come — nay, the time must come — when some statesman of 
authority, more fortunate even than President Monroe, will lay down the doc- 
trine that between English-speaking peoples war is impossible. 

To that noble sentiment Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne strictly 
adhered, and to their action we owe the settlement of all these ques- 
tions which have perplexed us with our northern neighbor, and, in 
consequence, the good relations which now exist between Great Brit- 
ain and the United States, and which it is to be hoped will always 
continue. The policy might have been adopted in 1798 as well as 
in 1898, but Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne were the first English 
statesmen who not only saw, but put into effect, their belief that the 
true policy for England was to be friends with the United States, 
and that friendship could be brought about by treating the United 
States not as had been the practice in the past, but as one great nation 
should always be treated by another. They came to us, it is true, in 
the hour of our success ; but none the less they are entitled to a place 
in the memory of Americans with Burke and Fox and Chatham, 
with Cobden and with Bright, who did not forget the common lan- 
guage and the common aspirations for freedom in the days when the 
Americans were a little people struggling to exist, or in those still 
darker days when the United States was trying to preserve the unity 
of the great Nation which Washington had founded and which Lin- 
coln was destined to save. 



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